ACROSS the brown dirt and stubbled grass that passes for a park, a cluster of boys vigorously contest a misshapen ball in front of a goal rigged up between rubbish bins. As the ball skids past the goalie in his oversized green-and-gold shirt, shouts erupt. The ball they boot in scruffy no-brand shoes is an ingenious composite of paper, string, plastic and twine.
The World Cup extends into the lives of these kids and thousands like them. They are unlikely to see a match in Cape Town's freshly minted stadium, but they will watch South Africa's team on ancient television sets in the cramped shacks of the Khayelitsha township — shacks assembled from scrap iron, mud bricks, cement sheet and discarded containers.
In Khayelitsha, where not even the basics of life can be guaranteed, football is everything a religion should be. It delivers hope: a way out of poverty, relief from boredom in a country where one in four adults do not have a job.
For the 500,000 people who occupy the houses in streets controlled by gangs, and where police never venture alone, soccer is a god-sent diversion.
Ndaye Mulamba, Africa's greatest player, who lives in a modest apartment 40 minutes by car from the Khayelitsha park, tells The Age that soccer is the game of black Africa, a unifying bond that crosses all nations and all regimes, all tribes. According to a survey by FIFA, the game's governing body, 46 million of the world's 265 million registered players are African.
Like the Khayelitsha children, Mulamba, now 60, learnt his basic skills kicking a foam rubber ball around the streets of Kinshasa in his native Congo.
"After school we would put away our books and go out and play. It made my father mad; he thought it was a waste of time."
Next week's World Cup brings to Africa — and to South Africa in particular — the biggest sporting event on the planet. The first cup played on African soil, it symbolises a transition from Third World to First World, an affirmation that South Africa, the continent's largest economy, deserves its place in the world order as a G20 nation. About $4.2 billion has been lavished on new stadiums, airports and freeways to accommodate an estimated 300,000 visitors. Nelson Mandela, the founding father of modern South Africa, wept tears of joy when FIFA awarded South Africa the right to host the 2010 Cup. "I feel like a boy of 15," he told an audience in Switzerland.
Thabo Mbeki, the then president, said in a letter to FIFA president Sepp Blatter: "We want, on behalf of our continent, to stage an event that will send ripples of confidence from the Cape to Cairo . . . We want to ensure that one day historians will reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and resolutely turned the tide on centuries of poverty and conflict."
Outwardly, at least, the African National Congress government of President Jacob Zuma has delivered much of what Mandela and Mbeki hoped for in a country still struggling to find its way.
Despite worries over domestic security (South Africa has the world's highest murder rate, at 50 a day), a crippling national transport workers' strike, and bungled ticket sales that made no provision for people without internet access or credit cards, the competition will kick off on time to packed crowds in venues regarded as among the world's best.
South Africa's team, known as "Bafana, Bafana" or the boys, has become a unifying focus for a nation once brutally divided by apartheid. In the wealthy districts of Atholl and Sandton in Johannesburg and the impoverished townships of Alexandra and Soweto, cars fly the red, green, blue and black flag. The raucous sound of the vuvuzelas, a plastic trumpet, echo through airport terminals and shopping malls.
But the big question surrounding South Africa's extravagant World Cup party is what benefits, if any, will flow for a nation under the influence of the ANC — a party wedded to 1980s notions of liberation politics — and an economy geared to favour the rich and well connected. Can the excitement of the cup be converted into something more lasting for a nation of 49 million, where the unemployment rate for blacks is 26 per cent and for whites 6 per cent, and where the gap between the rich and the dispossessed has widened?
The World Cup was meant to be Zuma's finest hour. Elected last year following a bitter power struggle with his predecessor, Mbeki, Zuma has taken a heavy hit in the popularity stakes. His macho style — "Give me my machinegun" was his rallying call to voters — may have attracted the disenchanted youth vote, but it has not served him well in office.
Since January the controversial Zulu leader, who was found not guilty of rape and avoided corruption charges before the election, has been embroiled in a string of personal scandals including a messy polygamous private life that includes a pregnant lover he has promised to marry. There is a growing perception among professional observers that Zuma is unable to deliver much more than a good speech.
"Information is power, but Zuma does not have much of either," wrote John Kane-Berman of the authoritative South African Institute of Race Relations.
"That he needs to set up a call centre to enable people to voice their grievances suggests a spectacular failure."
Professor Jonathan Jansen, the rector and vice-chancellor of the Free State University, believes Zuma represents a crude political class within the ANC that shows little interest in uniting the country.
"This country has not been blessed with the political leadership we had under Mandela — that was generous and gracious and also firm about what it means to be decent," he tells The Age.
Jansen, a respected figure regarded by some as an emerging moral voice,
also identifies Julius Malema, the brash head of the ANC Youth League, as another divisive figure intent on appealing to violent youth through racial slurs and "bad" behaviour. "You can only imagine [the effect] his singing of Kill the Boer[a reference to white farmers] had downstream.
"There is not a high level of decency and integrity in our government," he says."The crudification of the public space, this form of barbaric politics that says it is no longer enough just to protest, has appeal and I don't believe it is unconnected. I do not believe Malema just speaks for himself."
Malema's denigration of women and his support for the internationally vilified regime of Robert Mugabe, with its persecution of white farmers, has revived bitter memories of race-driven politics that Mandela tried to bury using the concept of the "Rainbow Nation".
Although Malema was fined and rebuked for his outbursts, it has not stopped him pushing for the nationalisation of mining, a policy that targets non-black companies where blacks occupy less than 10 per cent of top executive positions.
To compound matters, there are indications that the ANC is deeply preoccupied with finding a replacement for the 68-year-old self-declared one-term President.
But the most fundamental issue facing the ruling party is how best to reconnect with voters as the authentic voice of Black Africans, the party that smashed apartheid and put an end to racism.
“People like myself grew up with a very romantic view of the ANC," says Jansen.
"I never thought it would come to this. The party has lost the moral high ground established during the liberation struggle of the Mandela era.”
There are unmistakable signs that black voters no longer see the ANC as the party of natural choice. Last week on the Western Cape, the opposition Democratic Alliance of Helen Zille, Africa's only successful white woman political leader, won two key byelections in ANC strongholds with thumping 60 per cent-plus majorities. The seats were won despite threats of violence and vandalism by ANC youth activists.
Zille said in an exclusive interview that the alliance had campaigned on issues that made a difference to people's lives: new roads, health services and education.
“We were superbly organised, the ANC was not. We had a vision, they had none. We also had outstanding candidates including a dynamic community activist who was originally with the ANC. Voters want action, not false promises and threats.”
In Western Cape province the waiting list for social housing is a massive 450,000. With only 6 million registered taxpayers, Zille believes it is unrealistic for people to expect the state to provide them with a house, and she questions the quality of the 2 million houses the ANC claims to have built since it came to power.
Instead of houses, she promises freeways, sewerage, hospitals and libraries. “I am very frank with people about what we can and cannot do and they respect that.”
BUT for many it is already too late. In a Medecins Sans Frontieres clinic located in the heart of the Khayelitsha township a 31-year-old unemployed hairdresser, “Grace”, offers qualified praise for Zuma for taking a public stand in the fight against HIV and AIDS.
“President Zuma did the right thing by getting himself publicly tested for HIV and declaring the result. It was very encouraging to see him being so open. But his openness has probably come too late for many people,” Grace, who is HIV positive, told The Age.
Former president Mbeki blocked treatment, disparaged anti-viral drugs and questioned the very existence of AIDS — a stance estimated by a US study to have cost the lives of more than 300,000 people. Although Zuma has distanced himself from Mbeki's policies, HIV remains overwhelmingly the nation's biggest health challenge.
International charity AVERT estimates that during the month of the World Cup 23,000 South Africans will die from AIDS. Some 5.7 million people live with HIV.
Khayelitsha, where Grace has lived for most of her life, has one of the highest “burdens” of HIV in the country with more than 31 per cent of people affected.
Rates of tuberculosis are a staggering 70 per cent.
Dr Gilles Van Cutsem, co-ordinator of MSF's Khayelitsha Project, says that 10 years ago nobody was on anti-viral drugs, (known as ARVs), and today there are 15,000. Changes in national policy have also led to a wider distribution of condoms, the deployment of nurses in direct treatment and a plan to test 15 million people this year.
But while there has been progress on HIV/AIDS under Zuma, the "Rainbow Nation" is displaying serious signs of stress elsewhere.
There are simmering resentments over black business empowerment programs that have failed to redistribute wealth and fuelled corruption, and restrictive university quotas that discriminate against bright white students, leading in turn to a brain drain.
Last week Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said after a tour of the nation's worst schools she was shocked to find classes without textbooks or stationery, teachers absent and principals who had lied about school scores.
“Some schools had no teachers since school began in January.”
The health system also appears to be a shambles. At the neonatal unit of Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital in the Eastern Cape, 181 babies died this year.
A nurse was quoted as saying: “I have never seen anything like this before. The babies die one after the other.
"I see dead babies three or four times a week. By the time they are admitted it is too late to do anything.”
Fatalities were attributed to an oxygen compressor that had stopped working in January and had not been repaired. Lack of oxygen caused 23 of the deaths.
Another 17 babies died at the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital in Johannesburg during the same period for related reasons.
A significant part of the blame for the failure of schools and hospitals to deliver services at even the most basic level lies with a top-down system of governance, where central bureaucracies deploy party loyalists regardless of skills.
The system has not only failed to deliver efficiencies but, says John Kane-Berman, has, in local government, led to corruption, influence-peddling and a breakdown in governance.
So what for the future? The ANC and Zuma may have lost their way, but they remain the dominant political force, consistently pulling in more than 65 per cent of the national vote.
For the kids of Khayelitsha, soccer and the World Cup offer better prospects and a lot more fun than the black empowerment programs that are yet to change lives.
Jonathan Jansen believes the future of South Africa is in hands of the people, not politicians.
“It is up to ordinary people to push back against the poor examples set on the national stage by a corrupt political class. This country has made enormous strides when it comes to race relations.”
The vice-chancellor remains optimistic about the benefits that might flow from the World Cup.
“I don't care how much the cup costs to stage, what matters to me is whether the social benefits are significant enough to keep a very promising country together. That will be the real challenge.”
The World Cup extends into the lives of these kids and thousands like them. They are unlikely to see a match in Cape Town's freshly minted stadium, but they will watch South Africa's team on ancient television sets in the cramped shacks of the Khayelitsha township — shacks assembled from scrap iron, mud bricks, cement sheet and discarded containers.
In Khayelitsha, where not even the basics of life can be guaranteed, football is everything a religion should be. It delivers hope: a way out of poverty, relief from boredom in a country where one in four adults do not have a job.
For the 500,000 people who occupy the houses in streets controlled by gangs, and where police never venture alone, soccer is a god-sent diversion.
Ndaye Mulamba, Africa's greatest player, who lives in a modest apartment 40 minutes by car from the Khayelitsha park, tells The Age that soccer is the game of black Africa, a unifying bond that crosses all nations and all regimes, all tribes. According to a survey by FIFA, the game's governing body, 46 million of the world's 265 million registered players are African.
Like the Khayelitsha children, Mulamba, now 60, learnt his basic skills kicking a foam rubber ball around the streets of Kinshasa in his native Congo.
"After school we would put away our books and go out and play. It made my father mad; he thought it was a waste of time."
Next week's World Cup brings to Africa — and to South Africa in particular — the biggest sporting event on the planet. The first cup played on African soil, it symbolises a transition from Third World to First World, an affirmation that South Africa, the continent's largest economy, deserves its place in the world order as a G20 nation. About $4.2 billion has been lavished on new stadiums, airports and freeways to accommodate an estimated 300,000 visitors. Nelson Mandela, the founding father of modern South Africa, wept tears of joy when FIFA awarded South Africa the right to host the 2010 Cup. "I feel like a boy of 15," he told an audience in Switzerland.
Thabo Mbeki, the then president, said in a letter to FIFA president Sepp Blatter: "We want, on behalf of our continent, to stage an event that will send ripples of confidence from the Cape to Cairo . . . We want to ensure that one day historians will reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and resolutely turned the tide on centuries of poverty and conflict."
Outwardly, at least, the African National Congress government of President Jacob Zuma has delivered much of what Mandela and Mbeki hoped for in a country still struggling to find its way.
Despite worries over domestic security (South Africa has the world's highest murder rate, at 50 a day), a crippling national transport workers' strike, and bungled ticket sales that made no provision for people without internet access or credit cards, the competition will kick off on time to packed crowds in venues regarded as among the world's best.
South Africa's team, known as "Bafana, Bafana" or the boys, has become a unifying focus for a nation once brutally divided by apartheid. In the wealthy districts of Atholl and Sandton in Johannesburg and the impoverished townships of Alexandra and Soweto, cars fly the red, green, blue and black flag. The raucous sound of the vuvuzelas, a plastic trumpet, echo through airport terminals and shopping malls.
But the big question surrounding South Africa's extravagant World Cup party is what benefits, if any, will flow for a nation under the influence of the ANC — a party wedded to 1980s notions of liberation politics — and an economy geared to favour the rich and well connected. Can the excitement of the cup be converted into something more lasting for a nation of 49 million, where the unemployment rate for blacks is 26 per cent and for whites 6 per cent, and where the gap between the rich and the dispossessed has widened?
The World Cup was meant to be Zuma's finest hour. Elected last year following a bitter power struggle with his predecessor, Mbeki, Zuma has taken a heavy hit in the popularity stakes. His macho style — "Give me my machinegun" was his rallying call to voters — may have attracted the disenchanted youth vote, but it has not served him well in office.
Since January the controversial Zulu leader, who was found not guilty of rape and avoided corruption charges before the election, has been embroiled in a string of personal scandals including a messy polygamous private life that includes a pregnant lover he has promised to marry. There is a growing perception among professional observers that Zuma is unable to deliver much more than a good speech.
"Information is power, but Zuma does not have much of either," wrote John Kane-Berman of the authoritative South African Institute of Race Relations.
"That he needs to set up a call centre to enable people to voice their grievances suggests a spectacular failure."
Professor Jonathan Jansen, the rector and vice-chancellor of the Free State University, believes Zuma represents a crude political class within the ANC that shows little interest in uniting the country.
"This country has not been blessed with the political leadership we had under Mandela — that was generous and gracious and also firm about what it means to be decent," he tells The Age.
Jansen, a respected figure regarded by some as an emerging moral voice,
also identifies Julius Malema, the brash head of the ANC Youth League, as another divisive figure intent on appealing to violent youth through racial slurs and "bad" behaviour. "You can only imagine [the effect] his singing of Kill the Boer[a reference to white farmers] had downstream.
"There is not a high level of decency and integrity in our government," he says."The crudification of the public space, this form of barbaric politics that says it is no longer enough just to protest, has appeal and I don't believe it is unconnected. I do not believe Malema just speaks for himself."
Malema's denigration of women and his support for the internationally vilified regime of Robert Mugabe, with its persecution of white farmers, has revived bitter memories of race-driven politics that Mandela tried to bury using the concept of the "Rainbow Nation".
Although Malema was fined and rebuked for his outbursts, it has not stopped him pushing for the nationalisation of mining, a policy that targets non-black companies where blacks occupy less than 10 per cent of top executive positions.
To compound matters, there are indications that the ANC is deeply preoccupied with finding a replacement for the 68-year-old self-declared one-term President.
But the most fundamental issue facing the ruling party is how best to reconnect with voters as the authentic voice of Black Africans, the party that smashed apartheid and put an end to racism.
“People like myself grew up with a very romantic view of the ANC," says Jansen.
"I never thought it would come to this. The party has lost the moral high ground established during the liberation struggle of the Mandela era.”
There are unmistakable signs that black voters no longer see the ANC as the party of natural choice. Last week on the Western Cape, the opposition Democratic Alliance of Helen Zille, Africa's only successful white woman political leader, won two key byelections in ANC strongholds with thumping 60 per cent-plus majorities. The seats were won despite threats of violence and vandalism by ANC youth activists.
Zille said in an exclusive interview that the alliance had campaigned on issues that made a difference to people's lives: new roads, health services and education.
“We were superbly organised, the ANC was not. We had a vision, they had none. We also had outstanding candidates including a dynamic community activist who was originally with the ANC. Voters want action, not false promises and threats.”
In Western Cape province the waiting list for social housing is a massive 450,000. With only 6 million registered taxpayers, Zille believes it is unrealistic for people to expect the state to provide them with a house, and she questions the quality of the 2 million houses the ANC claims to have built since it came to power.
Instead of houses, she promises freeways, sewerage, hospitals and libraries. “I am very frank with people about what we can and cannot do and they respect that.”
BUT for many it is already too late. In a Medecins Sans Frontieres clinic located in the heart of the Khayelitsha township a 31-year-old unemployed hairdresser, “Grace”, offers qualified praise for Zuma for taking a public stand in the fight against HIV and AIDS.
“President Zuma did the right thing by getting himself publicly tested for HIV and declaring the result. It was very encouraging to see him being so open. But his openness has probably come too late for many people,” Grace, who is HIV positive, told The Age.
Former president Mbeki blocked treatment, disparaged anti-viral drugs and questioned the very existence of AIDS — a stance estimated by a US study to have cost the lives of more than 300,000 people. Although Zuma has distanced himself from Mbeki's policies, HIV remains overwhelmingly the nation's biggest health challenge.
International charity AVERT estimates that during the month of the World Cup 23,000 South Africans will die from AIDS. Some 5.7 million people live with HIV.
Khayelitsha, where Grace has lived for most of her life, has one of the highest “burdens” of HIV in the country with more than 31 per cent of people affected.
Rates of tuberculosis are a staggering 70 per cent.
Dr Gilles Van Cutsem, co-ordinator of MSF's Khayelitsha Project, says that 10 years ago nobody was on anti-viral drugs, (known as ARVs), and today there are 15,000. Changes in national policy have also led to a wider distribution of condoms, the deployment of nurses in direct treatment and a plan to test 15 million people this year.
But while there has been progress on HIV/AIDS under Zuma, the "Rainbow Nation" is displaying serious signs of stress elsewhere.
There are simmering resentments over black business empowerment programs that have failed to redistribute wealth and fuelled corruption, and restrictive university quotas that discriminate against bright white students, leading in turn to a brain drain.
Last week Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said after a tour of the nation's worst schools she was shocked to find classes without textbooks or stationery, teachers absent and principals who had lied about school scores.
“Some schools had no teachers since school began in January.”
The health system also appears to be a shambles. At the neonatal unit of Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital in the Eastern Cape, 181 babies died this year.
A nurse was quoted as saying: “I have never seen anything like this before. The babies die one after the other.
"I see dead babies three or four times a week. By the time they are admitted it is too late to do anything.”
Fatalities were attributed to an oxygen compressor that had stopped working in January and had not been repaired. Lack of oxygen caused 23 of the deaths.
Another 17 babies died at the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital in Johannesburg during the same period for related reasons.
A significant part of the blame for the failure of schools and hospitals to deliver services at even the most basic level lies with a top-down system of governance, where central bureaucracies deploy party loyalists regardless of skills.
The system has not only failed to deliver efficiencies but, says John Kane-Berman, has, in local government, led to corruption, influence-peddling and a breakdown in governance.
So what for the future? The ANC and Zuma may have lost their way, but they remain the dominant political force, consistently pulling in more than 65 per cent of the national vote.
For the kids of Khayelitsha, soccer and the World Cup offer better prospects and a lot more fun than the black empowerment programs that are yet to change lives.
Jonathan Jansen believes the future of South Africa is in hands of the people, not politicians.
“It is up to ordinary people to push back against the poor examples set on the national stage by a corrupt political class. This country has made enormous strides when it comes to race relations.”
The vice-chancellor remains optimistic about the benefits that might flow from the World Cup.
“I don't care how much the cup costs to stage, what matters to me is whether the social benefits are significant enough to keep a very promising country together. That will be the real challenge.”
- The Age
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